Dirty Deeds Done Cheap

by Peter Mercer

  We were, yet again, going to be working alongside American troops on this mission. It made life a little bit easier having the backup of the largest military machine in the world.

  Our first day on this mission started by running the gauntlet through Mosul as usual (trying just to get to this new job was a mission in itself!), then onto the main highway down to the southern area of northern Iraq. This road was like going down bomb alley, for it was a prime targeting area for the insurgents, and we were, yet again, very vulnerable, as we could be ambushed or encounter an IED at any time.

  On this occasion, as we tried to get out of Mosul as quickly and safely as possible, it became apparent all was not well. Some of the streets became deserted – not a good sign at all, as it normally meant imminent attack or a bomb. Boom! The American patrol in front of us was hit, and hit bad. Must have been some sort of bomb, but we couldn’t identify exactly what it was. All we could see was a burning, blown-to-pieces Humvee with burning American troops’ body parts strewn across the highway. I saw a smoking boot with the leg still inside it. What could we do? We needed to get the hell out of that potential kill zone and it seemed that we were again in deep shit.

  We carried on at breakneck speed and, fortunately, took no casualties. We all felt sorry for those Americans but we had to look after our own arses. They had armour and we didn’t. We still had to complete our mission, as we were employed and paid to do so. We had to press on, but the Yanks were quickly on the scene with all their backup.

  As soon as we got to the scientists’ camp that morning, which was actually being protected by another PMC company, we went off to the mess hall to feed all our guys. Now this place had one of the best eating places in northern Iraq, but it was full of gung-ho American mercenaries just cleaning their guns on the tables (pretty rude, I thought, when people were eating). However, the camp was nice and, if we didn’t like the conditions in the chow hall, they’d just tell us to fuck off and we would be on MREs again. And the Yanks do love their guns! They were also a nice bunch and in trouble spots around the world, I’ve always found the Americans to be very friendly.

  We spoke to the forensic guys we were going to be looking after and we were all of the opinion that we should do a route recce with the Yanks first. We came to the decision that the Yanks had to go in first across the desert. They were planning on going through with their mine-disposal equipment. This was basically a big mineproof truck that would drive the route and, if it went over anything, no one would be hurt. We were pretty much getting sick of a lot of our guys being blown to shreds. The fact that we were losing so many men was wearing quite a few of the lads down, not surprisingly. No matter how tough or professional you are, it still hurts when you lose friends. After the mine detectors and mine incinerators looked after our routes, we could then move in. There were no rules or regulations on this job. We just had to ensure these guys had as safe a passage to their place of work as possible. We were chosen for this task primarily because of our immense firepower and four-wheel-drive off-road Toyotas. And we were good – damned good!

  The route into the desert was pretty amazing and, just a few miles away from where these grave sites were situated were the ruins where parts of the film The Exorcist were shot. We drove past them and past the hotel that had been built to house the film crew. The hotel was abandoned once filming was finished and left for the use of the locals, though these were just Iraqi squatters. They moved in and took over and then had themselves a free hotel. This place looked very strange in the middle of the desert. It almost looked like the motel from Psycho. It was very bizarre. The ruins themselves were extremely impressive and we stopped to take a look around, but we had to be careful not to go inside because of the potential for booby traps.

  But that came later. The task of getting these forensic guys from A to B safely was going to be tough. First, we had to be introduced to them – if they had no trust in us, the job wouldn’t work. We ate with them at the canteen and built up a rapport with them. They weren’t as nervous as we were about being shuttled around northern Iraq – civilians in war zones tend to be very complacent and generally too trusting, and they don’t necessarily take into account what can happen to them. On one occasion in particular (later in our series of missions), they actually left camp on their own, with only a shadow of bodyguards, and one of their trucks was taken out big style, blown to bits by a big IED in the desert. A hard lesson to learn but a useful one – they had to be shown that you couldn’t fuck around in places as volatile and dangerous as this without proper protection. They needed an education and they learned a tough lesson.

  The camp they were living in was pretty luxurious compared with ours and very well protected. I think sometimes that because they were in the middle of nowhere they thought they were safe – but far from it: northern Iraq is rife with insurgents.

  The places we were now operating in were safe havens for insurgents and they could easily adapt and hide in some of these remote areas to launch their attacks effectively and very efficiently. The insurgents had mines all over the place and this was one threat we couldn’t avoid – it was out of our control. If you went over one of these, you were a goner. Even worse for us was that we had no way of finding or locating them.

  After we’d eaten in their far superior canteen, we prepared to move. The first thing we had to do when exiting camp was to establish a roadblock to stop the oncoming traffic. This would enable the convoy to pass safely out of the camp gate – a critical part of the task. If any vehicle approached too quickly or wouldn’t stop, it would be taken out.

  Once we were rolling we’d be pretty much OK apart from the landmines and, hopefully, the Yanks would take care of them. The guys and girls in the investigation team were now part of our convoy and under our protection. On the first mission, we flew out of the gate, the lead vehicle with the .50-cal going out the fastest to get ahead and then to establish the roadblock. It was now game on – there was no turning back.

  Following the death of our comrade, the Gurkha, in the incident with the mine, our arses were twitching constantly as we drove though the desert. As we travelled along these desert track roads, I had an unnerving feeling that these were the very same routes along which Saddam’s men took those poor people to their horrific executions. At the same time as we were having this unnerving feeling along the route of death, you couldn’t help but notice the remarkable scenery we were travelling through and, if you hadn’t known it was Iraq, you could, quite possibly, imagine you were on a sightseeing tour of somewhere totally different in the world. Of course, you were soon snapped out of this. We put our shemags on to aid our breathing because of the desert dust.

  One of our other big problems, apart from the shootings, bombings, landmines and breaking down, was getting stuck in the mud. This was more like quicksand and sometimes impossible to avoid. For this reason all of our vehicles carried towing chains. It was still a bastard of a job getting the trucks out but handy as hell having all these massive Fijians available to push as well. The biggest threat in the desert was the insurgent snipers. Some of these guys were very good and so we never underestimated them. They were highly trained, well financed and had the best weapons in Iraq (well, maybe not as good as ours).

  The insurgents always seemed to have the upper hand. They had the hills and mountains, the cover and the local knowledge. When you were hit it was almost impossible to see the shooter, mainly because of the speeds you were travelling at and the type of terrain you travelled through. It’s hard to identify targets at speed, especially over rough ground. It’s even harder actually to shoot and hit them while you’re moving.

  As we got nearer to the grave sites I could see a US military Black Hawk helicopter and a large tented area. The Americans used to guard this place 24/7. It was feared that the insurgents would come and try to destroy the graves. As there were far too many bodies in these sites to remove, they’d probably have to torch them or blow them to pieces. Either way, it
was evident that they were going to do their best to halt the evidence-gathering process.

  Grim as it was, we had this job to do. We got closer to the Black Hawk helicopter just as it was starting to wind up and prepare for takeoff. However, when the blades started turning, the extremely fine excavated sand was blown everywhere and we couldn’t see a fucking thing. We were also in the middle of nowhere, which didn’t make things any easier: just desert, nothing else. But we couldn’t see, so we just had to stop. We put more shemags on and then some eye protection and just waited for it to take off. After it had gone we still had to wait for all the sand to settle before we could carry on. We now were so covered in sand that it looked as if we’d been rolling in the stuff. It was made worse by the fact that we had doorless vehicles, but these vehicles were brilliant: they’d go through anything and take a hell of a lot of abuse.

  Since Saddam’s regime was overthrown in 2003, 270 mass graves have been reported. By mid-January 2004 the number of confirmed sites was up to 50-odd, and this would greatly increase in time. Some of the graves, not dissimilar to the ones we were protecting, were holding a few hundred bodies; some of the other graves went on for hundreds of metres and were packed with thousands of bodies. When we were there, 400,000 bodies had been discovered up to that point – this was by November. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch claimed it could even be thousands more.

  These people had gone missing over the past two decades. If those numbers proved accurate, they represented a crime against humanity surpassed only by the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Pol Pot’s Cambodian Killing Fields in the 1970s and the Nazi Holocaust of World War Two. In the 1983 attack against Kurdish citizens belonging to the Barzani tribe, eight thousand of whom were rounded up in northern Iraq, the Kurdish people saw more of Saddam’s regime and bore the brunt of it. These poor people were dragged screaming from their homes in the middle of the night and executed in the desert many miles away, and the aftermath of these bloodbaths was what we were witnessing.

  To give you a greater idea of how much of a ruthless bastard Saddam was, in 1988, at the culmination of the al-Anfal campaign, approximately 182,000 people just disappeared over a very short period of time. They were later found to have been executed in the west and southwest of Iraq and were eventually found in separate mass graves (typically, men in one, women and children in another). This was the situation we had to face every day on this new mission – looking at what that bastard did to his own people.

  That’s not all. I’ll give you a basic rundown showing the extent that this arsehole went to in order to get rid of people who stood up against his regime. He chemically attacked Kurdish villages between 1986 and 1988, including the Halabja attack when the Iraqi air force dropped sarin gas and VX and tabun chemical nerve agents on the civilian population, killing five-thousand people immediately and causing long-term medical problems for the survivors. There were later related deaths and was also an increase in the number of birth defects in a lot of the children. This pushed the eventual death toll up by thousands. It has been estimated that, altogether, more than a million Iraqis ‘disappeared’ under Saddam’s regime.

  There was a huge massacre in 1991 after Coalition troops pulled out and left Iraq. I was there and you could see the panic on the people’s faces as we left. There were people in the streets screaming and pleading with us not to go. We had all felt bad at the time and we pulled out at night so we wouldn’t have so much resistance from the Kurds; it was very harrowing. Saddam’s men then went in and killed and maimed tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians for fighting for autonomy in northern Iraq after the First Gulf War. Truly sickening stuff.

  The forensic scientists we were looking after planned to look at between eight and twenty grave sites and exhume the bodies, fully examine them and perform autopsies – then the case against Saddam could go ahead.

  The country is still not stable, though, even to this day. So-called honour killings in 2006 saw around six-hundred women burnt, beaten, shot, strangled, thrown from tall buildings, crushed by vehicles, drowned, decapitated or made to kill themselves. I heard the story of a young girl who was stoned to death in a Kurdish village for meeting a boyfriend. This in turn led to a revenge massacre of twenty-three Sunnis in Mosul, where our main line of work was. This country was fucked.

  As we looked around the graves it was amazing to see how these scientists could establish what had happened. It looked as if everything had been frozen in time. The bodies still had flesh on them, obviously from being preserved in the sand. You could still see the expressions on some of their faces – something I’d never like to see again. In my eyes the people we shot and killed in our gun battles brought it on themselves. We were forced to kill them purely out of self-defence. We were not executioners: we were just protecting ourselves.

  Sometimes, after dropping the scientists off, we went out of the camp for a look around. This place could seem very tranquil and there were some beautiful ruins, as I previously mentioned, that we’d often stop at. However, we had to be careful because if we got into a routine the insurgents would suss this and it would turn into a mess. We’d normally leave the grave sites during mid-afternoon. Then, at around teatime, we’d get food at the scientists’ camp (it was hard to get the Fijians to bypass any opportunity for food – they always wanted to stop). It was usually great grub.

  Home time was now here and, after our feed, we all readied ourselves for the run through the north. We got on the main highway and went for it, driving as fast as we could. After around 15 kilometres we started to see some smoke – it was on the right-hand side of the carriageway. As we approached we could see two fuel trucks burning and the pieces that were left were riddled with holes. The guys in the trucks were well and truly dead. They’d obviously tried to run this route through the north without an armed escort (probably their employing company trying to save money) and these naïve guys had paid for it with their lives. There was nothing we could do for them, but we had a quick look at the area – mainly to see if the insurgents were still about – and we saw nothing. The insurgents had obviously hit hard and fast and got out of the area just as fast, leaving no trace. We carried on, leaving the smouldering wrecks and dead bodies behind us.

  We arrived back in camp in no time, seeing just a few more bomb holes on the way. The adrenalin was always flowing while we were on the roads, but it was nice to get back to the safety and comfort of the camp.

  After the normal rigmarole of unloading and yet more feeding for the Fijians, it was decided that we’d have a party/barbecue just to wind down and raise our spirits. We got all the booze out and some of the lads went up to raid the kitchens – they had to bribe some of the Yanks there with a few cans of beer to get us some fresh food to chuck on the barbie. Once this was accomplished it was game on.

  We were soon all dressed in Fijian shirts (which were generally a bit too big for us) and the Gurkhas beheaded another goat – the last one we had. I was actually getting quite fond of that goat so that night I decided I was going to stick to the chicken kebabs. As usual for these occasions, we invited all of our American mates plus all the American women.

  The Gurkhas had the whisky and the curry under control and had started to dance. It has to be said that their curries were far better than their dancing – they reminded me of the ladyboys in Bangkok! At least this time someone remembered to confiscate their kukris (knives) for the duration of the party, which in itself was no mean feat, as they don’t like to be parted from them.

  The barbie was well under way when, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a gorgeous American soldier – even better, she was female! I made a beeline for her and we soon got chatting. Her name was Suzie. It quickly became obvious that there was a mutual attraction going on. We were both pretty plastered at this point, as neither of us had eaten anything from the barbie; in fact it seemed as if everyone was having a good time and was a little the worse for drink. Suzie and I sneaked away from the party an
d went back to my little hooch for a private drink. Within minutes we had our kits off and we were going for it hot and heavy. We eventually made it back to the party only to find that it had pretty much wound down for the evening, but we managed to scrounge up some leftover grub from the barbie.

  After our little escapade that evening a blossoming romance fell into place. It was great. I had all the excitement and adrenalin from my job plus the added benefit of having a romantic involvement and an even better way of relieving my stress! Suzie was a great girl, albeit that she was a sergeant in the US military. Romances in war zones rarely work out back in the real world but I enjoyed it while I could.

  Chapter 11

  Elections

  Our next mission was probably the most sensitive, potentially dangerous and definitely the most complex we had yet had to carry out. As I said, we were flexible and could and would do any mission we were given, so we were tasked with doing the main security for the Iraqi elections – this was going to be no mean feat. It was, yet again, a dangerous, precarious job.

  We now needed to take all of our guys training again, as this was going to be different altogether from what we had previously been doing. Most of them had never undertaken any task like this before. We had to train them in perimeter security and teach them search techniques. A lot of us British guys had done tours in Northern Ireland, so we were up to speed on all these procedures. This particular mission involved guarding a huge camp – which looked a bit like Butlins because it was an old holiday camp, but an Iraqi version, if you can imagine that. There were swings, roundabouts, slides, and even quite nice chalets. They had barbies, too – in fact everything that you would get in any holiday complex, except that this complex was in northern Iraq and we were now in control of it. Also, we had big fuck-off guns and were in the most dangerous place in the world. A very strange situation to be in!